In only his second movie project, eventual four-time Oscar-winning director and writer Joseph Mankiewicz's contributes some snappy, ironic dialogue to this 1946 film noir. John Hodiak stars as a returning WWII vet with amnesia who attempts to rediscover his identity in a postwar LA netherworld of hotels, bars, steam baths, sanitariums, and creepy bungalows. His dogged sleuthing thrusts him into a three-year-old murder case and a hunt for a missing $2 million. Great supporting work from Lloyd Nolan as a drugstore philosopher, homicide cop, Fritz Kortner as an unscrupulous German-Expressionist fortune-teller, and Richard Conte as as an affable nightclub operator.